Mariška Bolyanatz Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and French Studies at Occidental College (Oxy), appointed in 2017. She holds a B.A. from Gordon College, an M.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Ph.D. from UCLA. Her research focuses on socially conditioned variation in speech production and perception in Spanish, particularly examining the sociolinguistic implications of phonetic features in Chilean and Salvadoran Spanish. She teaches courses such as Introduction to Linguistics, Spanish in the United States, and Spanish Sociolinguistics, emphasizing inclusive pedagogy and data analysis skills. Education: B.A., Gordon College, Massachusetts M.A., University of Illinois, Chicago Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Research Interests: Sociolinguistics, Phonetics, Spanish Language Variation, Linguistic Discrimination, Heritage Language Maintenance, and the social meanings of phonetic variation in Spanish. Her work analyzes acoustic and morpho-phonological patterns to explore how speech features correlate with socioeconomic identity and intergroup perception. Publications: Dr. Bolyanatz Brown has published widely on topics such as coda /s/ weakening in Chilean Spanish, cross-dialectal acoustic differences in /s/, and sociophonetic perception of intervocalic /k/ voicing. Her research bridges laboratory-based phonetic analysis with sociolinguistic theory, contributing to debates on sound change and language variation. Teaching Philosophy: Her courses foster critical engagement with language use, encouraging students to connect linguistic patterns to broader societal issues such as racism and education policy. She emphasizes fieldwork and data collection, as seen in her Spanish in the United States course, where students conduct community-based research in Los Angeles. Labs/Teams: No specific lab is mentioned, though her research involves collaborative fieldwork and acoustic analysis projects with colleagues like Brandon Rogers and Franny Brogan.
